F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940), widely known simply as Scott Fitzgerald, was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term that he popularized in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age. He published four novels, four story collections, and 164 short stories. He achieved temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, but he did not receive critical acclaim until after his death; he is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

Fitzgerald was born into a middle-class family in Saint Paul, Minnesota, but he was raised primarily in New York state. He attended Princeton University where he befriended future literary critic Edmund Wilson. He had a failed romantic relationship with Chicago socialite Ginevra King and dropped out of Princeton in 1917 to join the Army during World War I. While stationed in Alabama, he met Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belonged to Montgomery's exclusive country-club set. She initially rejected Fitzgerald's marriage proposal due to his lack of financial prospects, but she agreed to marry him after he published the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel became a cultural sensation and cemented his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.

His second novel The Beautiful and Damned (1922) propelled Fitzgerald further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he wrote numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire. He frequented Europe during this period, where he befriended modernist writers and artists of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel The Great Gatsby (1925) received generally favorable reviews but was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now hailed by some literary critics as the "Great American Novel". Fitzgerald completed his final novel Tender Is the Night (1934) following the deterioration of his wife's mental health and her placement in a mental institution for schizophrenia.

Fitzgerald struggled financially because of the declining popularity of his works during the Great Depression. He then moved to Hollywood where he embarked on an unsuccessful career as a screenwriter. While living in Hollywood, he cohabited with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. He had long struggled with alcoholism, and he attained sobriety only to die of a heart attack in 1940 at age 44. His friend Edmund Wilson edited and published the unfinished fifth novel The Last Tycoon (1941). Wilson described Fitzgerald's style: "romantic, but also cynical; he is bitter as well as ecstatic; astringent as well as lyrical. He casts himself in the role of playboy, yet at the playboy he incessantly mocks. He is vain, a little malicious, of quick intelligence and wit, and has the Irish gift for turning language into something iridescent and surprising."

Life

Childhood and early years

Born on September 24, 1896, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to a middle-class Catholic family, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was named after Francis Scott Key, a distant cousin who wrote the lyrics in 1814 for the song "The Star-Spangled Banner", which became the American national anthem.Template:EfnTemplate:Sfnm His mother was Mary "Molly" McQuillan Fitzgerald, the daughter of an Irish immigrant who became wealthy as a wholesale grocer.Template:Sfnm His father, Edward Fitzgerald, descended from Irish and English ancestry, and had moved to Minnesota from Maryland after the American Civil War to open a wicker-furniture manufacturing business.Template:Sfn Edward's first cousin twice removed, Mary Surratt, was hanged in 1865 for conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.Template:Sfnm

One year after Fitzgerald's birth, his father's wicker-furniture manufacturing business failed, and the family moved to Buffalo, New York, where his father joined Procter & Gamble as a salesman.Template:Sfn Fitzgerald spent the first decade of his childhood primarily in Buffalo with a brief interlude in Syracuse between January 1901 and September 1903.Template:Sfnm His parents sent him to two Catholic schools on Buffalo's West Side—first Holy Angels Convent (1903–1904) and then Nardin Academy (1905–1908).Template:Sfn As a boy, Fitzgerald was described by his peers as unusually intelligent with a keen interest in literature.Template:Sfn

Procter & Gamble fired his father in March 1908, and the family returned to Saint Paul.Template:Sfn Although his alcoholic father was now destitute, his mother's inheritance supplemented the family income and allowed them to continue living a middle-class lifestyle.Template:Sfnm Fitzgerald attended St. Paul Academy from 1908 to 1911.Template:Sfnm At 13, Fitzgerald had his first piece of fiction published in the school newspaper.Template:Sfnm In 1911, Fitzgerald's parents sent him to the Newman School, a Catholic prep school in Hackensack, New Jersey.Template:Sfnm At Newman, Father Sigourney Fay recognized his literary potential and encouraged him to become a writer.Template:Sfnm

Princeton and Ginevra King

After graduating from Newman in 1913, Fitzgerald enrolled at Princeton University and became one of the few Catholics in the student body. While at Princeton, Fitzgerald shared a room and became long time friends with John Biggs Jr, who later helped the author find a home in Delaware. As the semesters passed, he formed close friendships with classmates Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop, both of whom would later aid his literary career.Template:Sfnm Determined to be a successful writer, Fitzgerald wrote stories and poems for the Princeton Triangle Club, the Princeton Tiger, and the Nassau Lit.Template:Sfn

During his sophomore year, the 18-year-old Fitzgerald returned home to Saint Paul during Christmas break where he met and fell in love with 16-year-old Chicago debutante Ginevra King.Template:Sfn The couple began a romantic relationship spanning several years.Template:Sfnm She would become his literary model for the characters of Isabelle Borgé in This Side of Paradise, Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, and many others.Template:Sfnm While Fitzgerald attended Princeton, Ginevra attended Westover, a Connecticut women's school.Template:Sfn He visited Ginevra at Westover until her expulsion for flirting with a crowd of young male admirers from her dormitory window.Template:Sfnm Her return home ended Fitzgerald's weekly courtship.Template:Sfnm

Despite the great distance separating them, Fitzgerald still attempted to pursue Ginevra, and he traveled across the country to visit her family's Lake Forest estate.Template:Sfn Although Ginevra loved him,Template:Sfn her upper-class family belittled Scott's courtship because of his lower-class status compared to her other wealthy suitors.Template:Sfn Her imperious father Charles Garfield King purportedly told a young Fitzgerald that "poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls."Template:Sfnm

Rejected by Ginevra as an unsuitable match, a suicidal Fitzgerald enlisted in the United States Army amid World War I and received a commission as a second lieutenant.Template:Sfn While awaiting deployment to the Western front where he hoped to die in combat, he was stationed in a training camp at Fort Leavenworth under the command of Captain Dwight Eisenhower, the future general of the Army and United States President.Template:Sfnm Fitzgerald purportedly chafed under Eisenhower's authority and disliked him intensely.Template:Sfn Hoping to have a novel published before his anticipated death in Europe, Fitzgerald hastily wrote a 120,000-word manuscript entitled The Romantic Egotist in three months.Template:Sfn When he submitted the manuscript to publishers, Scribner's rejected it,Template:Sfn although the impressed reviewer, Max Perkins, praised Fitzgerald's writing and encouraged him to resubmit it after further revisions.Template:Sfn

Army service and Zelda Sayre

A pencil sketch of Zelda Sayre's left profile. Her hair is in a short bob characteristic of the style worn by flappers in the early 1920s.

A sketch of Zelda Sayre by artist Gordon Bryant published in Metropolitan Magazine

In June 1918, Fitzgerald was garrisoned with the 45th and 67th Infantry Regiments at Camp Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama.Template:Sfnm Attempting to rebound from his rejection by Ginevra, a lonely Fitzgerald began dating a variety of young Montgomery women. At a country club, Fitzgerald met Zelda Sayre, a 17-year-old Southern belle and the affluent granddaughter of a Confederate senator whose extended family owned the first White House of the Confederacy.Template:EfnTemplate:Sfnm Zelda was one of the most celebrated debutantes of Montgomery's exclusive country club set.Template:Sfn A romance soon blossomed, although he continued writing Ginevra, asking in vain if there was any chance of resuming their former relationship.Template:Sfn Three days after Ginevra married a wealthy Chicago businessman, Fitzgerald professed his affections for Zelda in September 1918.Template:Sfn

Fitzgerald's Montgomery sojourn was interrupted briefly in November 1918 when he was transferred northward to Camp Mills, Long Island.Template:Sfnm While he was stationed there, the Allied Powers signed an armistice with Germany, and the war ended.Template:Sfn Dispatched back to the base near Montgomery to await discharge, he renewed his pursuit of Zelda.Template:Sfnm Together, Scott and Zelda engaged in what he later described as sexual recklessness, and by December 1918, they had consummated their relationship.Template:EfnTemplate:Sfnm Although Fitzgerald did not initially intend to marry Zelda, the couple gradually viewed themselves as informally engaged, although Zelda declined to marry him until he proved financially successful.Template:Sfn

Upon his discharge on February 14, 1919, he moved to New York City, where he unsuccessfully begged the editors of various newspapers for a job.Template:Sfn He then turned to writing advertising copy to sustain himself while seeking a breakthrough as an author of fiction.Template:Sfn Fitzgerald wrote to Zelda frequently, and by March 1919, he had sent Zelda his mother's ring, and the two became officially engaged.Template:Sfnm Several of Fitzgerald's friends opposed the match, as they deemed Zelda ill-suited for him. Likewise, Zelda's Episcopalian family was wary of Scott because of his Catholic background, precarious finances, and excessive drinking.Template:Sfnm

Seeking his fortune in New York, Fitzgerald worked for the Barron Collier advertising agency and lived in a single room in Manhattan's West Side.Template:SfnmTemplate:Sfnm Although he received a small raise for creating a catchy slogan, "We keep you clean in Muscatine", for an Iowa laundry,Template:Sfnm Fitzgerald subsisted in relative poverty. Still aspiring to a lucrative career in literature, he wrote several short stories and satires in his spare time.Template:Sfnm Rejected over 120 times, he sold only one story, "Babes in the Woods", and received a pittance of $30.Template:Sfnm

Struggles and literary breakthrough

With dreams of a lucrative career in New York City dashed, Fitzgerald could not convince Zelda that he would be able to support her, and she broke off the engagement in June 1919.Template:Sfn In the wake of Fitzgerald's rejection by Ginevra two years prior, his subsequent rejection by Zelda dispirited him.Template:Sfn While Prohibition-era New York City was experiencing the burgeoning Jazz Age, Fitzgerald felt defeated and rudderless: two women had rejected him in succession, he detested his advertising job, his stories failed to sell, he could not afford new clothes, and his future seemed bleak.Template:Sfnm Unable to earn a successful living, Fitzgerald publicly threatened to jump to his death from a window ledge of the Yale Club,Template:Efn and he carried a revolver daily while contemplating suicide.Template:Sfn

In July, Fitzgerald quit his advertising job and returned to St. Paul.Template:Sfn Having returned to his hometown as a failure, Fitzgerald became a social recluse and lived on the top floor of his parents' home at 599 Summit Avenue, on Cathedral Hill.Template:Sfn He decided to make one last attempt to become a novelist and to stake everything on the success or failure of a book.Template:Sfn Abstaining from alcohol and parties,Template:Sfn he worked day and night to revise The Romantic Egotist as This Side of Paradise—an autobiographical account of his Princeton years and his romances with Ginevra, Zelda, and others.Template:Sfnm

While revising his novel, Fitzgerald took a job repairing car roofs at the Northern Pacific Shops in St. Paul.Template:Sfn One evening in the fall of 1919, after an exhausted Fitzgerald had returned home from work, the postman rang and delivered a telegram from Scribner's announcing that his revised manuscript had been accepted for publication.Template:Sfn Upon reading the telegram, an ecstatic Fitzgerald ran down the streets of St. Paul and flagged down random automobiles to share the news.Template:Sfn

Fitzgerald's debut novel appeared in bookstores on March 26, 1920, and became an instant success. This Side of Paradise sold approximately 40,000 copies in the first year.Template:Sfnm Within months of its publication, his debut novel became a cultural sensation in the United States, and F. Scott Fitzgerald became a household name. Critics such as H. L. Mencken hailed the work as the best American novel of the year,Template:Sfn and newspaper columnists described the work as the first realistic American college novel.Template:Sfn The work catapulted Fitzgerald's career as a writer. Magazines now accepted his previously rejected stories, and The Saturday Evening Post published his story "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" with his name on its May 1920 cover.Template:Sfn

Fitzgerald's new fame enabled him to earn much higher rates for his short stories, and Zelda resumed their engagement as Fitzgerald could now pay for her accustomed lifestyle.Template:EfnTemplate:Sfn Although they were re-engaged, Fitzgerald's feelings for Zelda were at an all-time low, and he remarked to a friend, "I wouldn't care if she died, but I couldn't stand to have anybody else marry her."Template:Sfn Despite mutual reservations, they married in a simple ceremony on April 3, 1920, at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York.Template:Sfnm At the time of their wedding, Fitzgerald claimed neither of them still loved the other, and the early years of their marriage were more akin to a friendship.

New York City and the Jazz Age

It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald in "Echoes of the Jazz Age" (1931)Template:Sfn

Living in luxury at the Biltmore Hotel in New York City,Template:Sfn the newlywed couple became national celebrities, as much for their wild behavior as for the success of Fitzgerald's novel. At the Biltmore, Scott did handstands in the lobby,Template:Sfn while Zelda slid down the hotel banisters.Template:Sfn After several weeks, the hotel asked them to leave for disturbing other guests.Template:Sfn The couple relocated two blocks to the Commodore Hotel on 42nd Street where they spent half an hour spinning in the revolving door.Template:Sfn Fitzgerald likened their juvenile behavior in New York City to two "small children in a great bright unexplored barn."Template:Sfn Writer Dorothy Parker first encountered the couple riding on the roof of a taxi.Template:Sfn "They did both look as though they had just stepped out of the sun", Parker recalled, "their youth was striking. Everyone wanted to meet him."Template:Sfn

As Fitzgerald was one of the most celebrated novelists during the Jazz Age, many admirers sought his acquaintanceship. He met sports columnist Ring Lardner,Template:Sfn journalist Rebecca West,Template:Sfn cartoonist Rube Goldberg,Template:Sfn actress Laurette Taylor,Template:Sfn actor Lew Fields,Template:Sfn comedian Ed Wynn,Template:Sfn and many others. He became close friends with critics George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken, the influential co-editors of The Smart Set magazine who led an ongoing cultural war against puritanism in American arts.Template:Sfn At the peak of his commercial success and cultural salience, Fitzgerald recalled traveling in a taxi one afternoon in New York City and weeping when he realized that he would never be as happy again.Template:Sfn

A black and white portrait of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre. Both are partially reclined with Zelda leaning against Fitzgerald. His right hand is clasping her left hand.

Portrait of Scott and Zelda by Alfred Cheney Johnston, 1923

Fitzgerald's ephemeral happiness mirrored the societal giddiness of the Jazz Age, a term which he popularized in his essays and stories.Template:Sfnm He described the era as racing "along under its own power, served by great filling stations full of money." In Fitzgerald's eyes, the era represented a morally permissive time when Americans became disillusioned with prevailing social norms and obsessed with self-gratification.

During this hedonistic era, alcohol increasingly fueled the Fitzgeralds' social life,Template:Sfn and the couple consumed gin-and-fruit concoctions at every outing.Template:Sfn Publicly, their alcohol intake meant little more than napping at parties, but privately it led to bitter quarrels.Template:Sfn

As their quarrels worsened, the couple accused each other of marital infidelities.Template:Sfn They remarked to friends that their marriage would not last much longer.Template:Sfn After their eviction from the Commodore Hotel in May 1920, the couple spent the summer in a cottage in Westport, Connecticut, near Long Island Sound.Template:Sfn

In Winter 1921, his wife became pregnant as Fitzgerald worked on his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, and the couple traveled to his home in St. Paul, Minnesota, to have the child.Template:Sfnm On October 26, 1921, Zelda gave birth to their daughter and only child Frances Scott "Scottie" Fitzgerald.Template:Sfnm As she emerged from the anesthesia, he recorded Zelda saying, "Oh, God, goofo [sic] I'm drunk. Mark Twain. Isn't she smart—she has the hiccups. I hope it's beautiful and a fool—a beautiful little fool."Template:Sfnm Fitzgerald later used some of her rambling almost verbatim for Daisy Buchanan's dialogue in The Great Gatsby.Template:Sfnm

Long Island and second novel

File:F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Passport Book Page 4 Retouched.jpg

Passport photos of the Fitzgeralds, 1923

After his daughter's birth, Fitzgerald returned to drafting The Beautiful and Damned. The novel's plot follows a young artist and his wife who become dissipated and bankrupt while partying in New York City.Template:Sfnm He modeled the characters of Anthony Patch on himself and Gloria Patch on—in his words—the chill-mindedness and selfishness of Zelda.Template:Sfn Metropolitan Magazine serialized the manuscript in late 1921, and Scribner's published the book in March 1922. Scribner's prepared an initial print run of 20,000 copies. It sold well enough to warrant additional print runs reaching 50,000 copies.Template:Sfnm That year, Fitzgerald released an anthology of eleven stories entitled Tales of the Jazz Age. He had written all but two of the stories before 1920.Template:Sfn

Following Fitzgerald's adaptation of his story "The Vegetable" into a play, in October 1922, he and Zelda moved to Great Neck, Long Island, to be near Broadway.Template:Sfn Although he hoped The Vegetable would inaugurate a lucrative career as a playwright, the play's November 1923 premiere was an unmitigated disaster.Template:Sfnm The bored audience walked out during the second act.Template:Sfnm Fitzgerald wished to halt the show and disavow the production.Template:Sfnm During an intermission, Fitzgerald asked lead actor Ernest Truex if he planned to finish the performance.Template:Sfn When Truex replied in the affirmative, Fitzgerald fled to the nearest bar.Template:Sfn Mired in debt by the play's failure, Fitzgerald wrote short stories to restore his finances.Template:Sfnm Fitzgerald viewed his stories as worthless except for "Winter Dreams", which he described as his first attempt at the Gatsby idea.Template:Sfnm When not writing, Fitzgerald and his wife continued to socialize and drink at Long Island parties.Template:Sfn

Despite enjoying the Long Island milieu, Fitzgerald disapproved of the extravagant parties,Template:Sfn and the wealthy people he encountered often disappointed him.Template:Sfn While admiring the wealth and striving to emulate the lifestyles of the rich, he simultaneously found their privileged behavior morally disquieting, and possessed "the smoldering resentment of a peasant" towards them. While the couple were living on Long Island, one of Fitzgerald's wealthier neighbors was Max Gerlach.Template:Sfn Purportedly born in America to a German immigrant family, Gerlach had been a major in the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I and became a gentleman bootlegger who lived like a millionaire in New York.Template:Sfn Flaunting his new wealth, Gerlach threw lavish parties,Template:Sfn never wore the same shirt twice,Template:Sfn used the phrase "old sport",Template:Sfn and fostered myths about himself, including that he was a relation of the German Kaiser.Template:Sfn These details would inspire Fitzgerald in creating his next work, The Great Gatsby.Template:Sfnm

Europe and The Great Gatsby

In May 1924, Fitzgerald and his family moved abroad to Europe.Template:Sfn He continued writing his third novel, which would eventually become his magnum opus The Great Gatsby.Template:Sfnm Fitzgerald had been planning the novel since 1923, when he told his publisher Maxwell Perkins of his plans to embark upon a work of art that would be beautiful and intricately patterned.Template:Sfnm He had already written 18,000 words for his novel by mid-1923 but discarded most of his new story as a false start.Template:Sfn Initially titled Trimalchio—an allusion to the Latin work Satyricon—the plot followed the rise of a parvenu who seeks wealth to win the woman he loves.Template:Sfn For source material, Fitzgerald drew heavily on his experiences on Long Island and once again on his lifelong obsession with his first love Ginevra King.Template:Sfnm "The whole idea of Gatsby", he later explained, "is the unfairness of a poor young man not being able to marry a girl with money. This theme comes up again and again because I lived it."Template:Sfn

Work on The Great Gatsby slowed while the Fitzgeralds sojourned on the French Riviera, where a marital crisis developed.Template:Sfnm Zelda became infatuated with a French naval aviator, Template:Ill.Template:Sfnm She spent afternoons swimming at the beach and evenings dancing at the casinos with him. After six weeks, Zelda asked for a divorce.Template:Sfnm Fitzgerald sought to confront Jozan and locked Zelda in their house until he could do so.Template:Sfnm Before any confrontation could occur, Jozan—who had no intention of marrying Zelda—left the Riviera, and the Fitzgeralds never saw him again.Template:Sfnm Soon after, Zelda overdosed on sleeping pills.Template:Sfn The couple never spoke of the incident,Template:Sfnm but the episode led to a permanent breach in their marriage.Template:Sfnm Jozan later dismissed the entire incident and claimed no infidelity or romance had occurred: "They both had a need of drama, they made it up and perhaps they were the victims of their own unsettled and a little unhealthy imagination."Template:Sfn

Following this incident, the Fitzgeralds relocated to Rome.Template:Sfn On December 1, 1924, Fitzgerald was in a drunken brawl that ended in a Rome police station, there he punched an officer and was severely beaten by others. In Rome, he made revisions to the Gatsby manuscript throughout the winter and submitted the final version in February 1925.Template:Sfn Fitzgerald declined a $10,000 offer for the serial rights, as it would delay the book's publication.Template:Sfn Upon its release on April 10, 1925, Willa Cather, T. S. Eliot, and Edith Wharton praised Fitzgerald's work,Template:Sfn and the novel received generally favorable reviews from contemporary literary critics.Template:Sfnm Despite this reception, Gatsby became a commercial failure compared to his previous efforts, This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and Damned (1922).Template:Sfn By the end of the year, the book had sold fewer than 23,000 copies.Template:Sfn For the rest of his life, The Great Gatsby experienced tepid sales.Template:Efn It would take decades for the novel to gain its present acclaim and popularity, thanks also to the popular dust-jacket art, named Celestial Eyes.Template:Sfn

Hemingway and the Lost Generation

After wintering in Italy, the Fitzgeralds returned to France, where they alternated between Paris and the French Riviera until 1926. During this period, he became friends with writer Gertrude Stein, bookseller Sylvia Beach, novelist James Joyce, poet Ezra Pound and other members of the American expatriate community in Paris,Template:Sfn some of whom would later be identified with the Lost Generation.Template:Sfn Most notable among them was a relatively unknown Ernest Hemingway, whom Fitzgerald first met in May 1925 and grew to admire.Template:Sfnm Hemingway later recalled that, during this early period of their relationship, Fitzgerald became his most loyal friend.Template:Sfn

In contrast to his friendship with Scott, Hemingway disliked Zelda and described her as "insane" in his memoir, A Moveable Feast. Hemingway claimed that Zelda preferred her husband to write lucrative short stories as opposed to novels in order to support her accustomed lifestyle.Template:EfnTemplate:Sfn "I always felt a story in the [Saturday Evening] Post was tops", Zelda later recalled, "But Scott couldn't stand to write them."Template:Sfn To supplement their income, Fitzgerald often wrote stories for magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's Weekly, and Esquire.Template:Sfnm He would first write his stories in an 'authentic' manner, then rewrite them to add plot twists which increased their salability as magazine stories.Template:Sfn This "whoring", as Hemingway called these sales, emerged as a sore point in their friendship.Template:Sfn After reading The Great Gatsby, an impressed Hemingway vowed to put any differences with Fitzgerald aside and to aid him in any way he could, although he feared Zelda would derail Fitzgerald's writing career.Template:Sfn

Hemingway alleged that Zelda sought to destroy her husband, and she purportedly taunted Fitzgerald over his penis' size.Template:Sfn After examining it in a public restroom, Hemingway confirmed Fitzgerald's penis to be of average size.Template:Sfn Both Fitzgerald's mistress Sheilah Graham and acquaintance Arnold Gingrich, "who once saw Fitzgerald with his bathrobe open," likewise attested his genitalia to be average.Template:Sfn A more serious rift soon occurred when Zelda belittled Fitzgerald with homophobic slurs and accused him of engaging in a homosexual relationship with Hemingway.Template:Sfn At the time, Fitzgerald had written in his private notebook about Hemingway: "I really loved him, but of course it wore out like a love affair."Template:Sfn Fitzgerald decided to have sex with a prostitute to prove his heterosexuality.Template:Sfn Zelda found condoms he had purchased before any encounter occurred, and a bitter quarrel ensued, resulting in lingering jealousy.Template:Sfn Soon after, Zelda threw herself down a flight of marble stairs at a party because Fitzgerald, engrossed in talking to Isadora Duncan, ignored her.Template:Sfnm In December 1926, after two unpleasant years in Europe which considerably strained their marriage, the Fitzgeralds returned to America.Template:Sfn

Sojourn in Hollywood and Lois Moran

In 1926, film producer John W. Considine Jr. invited Fitzgerald to Hollywood during its golden age to write a flapper comedy for United Artists.Template:Sfn He agreed and moved into a studio-owned bungalow with Zelda in January 1927.Template:Sfn In Hollywood, the Fitzgeralds attended parties where they danced the black bottom and mingled with film stars.Template:Sfn At one party they outraged guests Ronald Colman and Constance Talmadge by a prank: They requested their watches and, retreating into the kitchen, boiled the expensive timepieces in a pot of tomato sauce.Template:Sfnm The Hollywood life's novelty quickly faded for the Fitzgeralds, and Zelda frequently complained of boredom.Template:Sfn

While attending a lavish party at the Pickfair estate, Fitzgerald met 17-year-old Lois Moran, a starlet who had gained widespread fame for her role in Stella Dallas (1925).Template:Sfnm Desperate for intellectual conversation, Moran and Fitzgerald discussed literature and philosophy for hours while sitting on a staircase.Template:Sfn Fitzgerald was 31 years old and past his prime, but the smitten Moran regarded him as a sophisticated, handsome, and gifted writer. Consequently, she pursued a relationship with him.Template:Sfn The starlet became a muse for the author, and he wrote her into a short story called "Magnetism", in which a young Hollywood film starlet causes a married writer to waver in his sexual devotion to his wife.Template:Sfn Fitzgerald later rewrote Rosemary Hoyt—one of the central characters in Tender is the Night—to mirror Moran.Template:Sfnm

Jealous of Fitzgerald and Moran, an irate Zelda set fire to her own expensive clothing in a bathtub as a self-destructive act.Template:Sfn She disparaged the teenage Moran as "a breakfast food that many men identified with whatever they missed from life."Template:Sfn Fitzgerald's relations with Moran further exacerbated the Fitzgeralds' marital difficulties and, after merely two months in Jazz Age Hollywood, the unhappy couple departed for Delaware in March 1927.Template:Sfnm

Zelda's illness and final novel

The Fitzgeralds rented "Ellerslie", a mansion near Wilmington, Delaware, until 1929.Template:Sfn Fitzgerald returned to his fourth novel but proved unable to make any progress due to his alcoholism and poor work ethic.Template:Sfn In Spring 1929, the couple returned to Europe.Template:Sfn That winter, Zelda's behavior grew increasingly erratic and violent.Template:Sfnm During an automobile trip to Paris along the mountainous roads of the Grande Corniche, Zelda seized the car's steering wheel and tried to kill herself along with Fitzgerald and their nine-year-old daughter by driving over a cliff.Template:Sfn Following this homicidal incident, doctors diagnosed Zelda with schizophrenia in June 1930.Template:Sfnm The couple traveled to Switzerland, where she underwent treatment at a clinic.Template:Sfn They returned to America in September 1931.Template:Sfnm In February 1932, she underwent hospitalization at the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.Template:Sfnm

A photographic portrait of critic H. L. Mencken. His hair is parted in the middle, and he appears to be leaning on his left arm. He is wearing a dark tie and a dark suit with peak lapels. A white handkerchief is visible in his suit pocket.

H. L. Mencken believed that Fitzgerald's career as a novelist was in jeopardy because of his wife's mental illness.

In April 1932, when the psychiatric clinic allowed Zelda to travel with her husband, Fitzgerald took her to lunch with critic H. L. Mencken, by then the literary editor of The American Mercury.Template:Sfn In his private diary, Mencken noted Zelda "went insane in Paris a year or so ago, and is still plainly more or less off her base."Template:Sfn Throughout the luncheon, she manifested signs of mental distress.Template:Sfn A year later, when Mencken met Zelda for the last time, he described her mental illness as immediately evident to any onlooker and her mind as "only half sane."Template:Sfn He regretted Fitzgerald could not write novels, as he had to write magazine stories to pay for Zelda's psychiatric treatment.Template:Sfn

During this time, Fitzgerald rented the "La Paix" estate in the suburb of Towson, Maryland, and worked on his next novel, which drew heavily on recent experiences.Template:Sfn The story concerned a promising young American named Dick Diver who marries a mentally ill young woman; their marriage deteriorates while they are abroad in Europe.Template:Sfn While Fitzgerald labored on his novel, Zelda wrote—and sent to Scribner's—her own fictionalized version of these same autobiographical events in Save Me the Waltz (1932).Template:Sfn Piqued by what he saw as theft of his novel's plot material, Fitzgerald would later describe Zelda as a plagiarist and a third-rate writer.Template:EfnTemplate:Sfn Despite his annoyance, he insisted upon few revisions to the work,Template:Efn and he persuaded Perkins to publish Zelda's novel.Template:Sfnm Scribner's published Zelda's novel in October 1932, but it was a commercial and critical failure.Template:Sfn

Fitzgerald's own novel debuted in April 1934 as Tender Is the Night and received mixed reviews.Template:Sfnm Its structure threw off many critics who felt Fitzgerald had not lived up to their expectations.Template:Sfn Hemingway and others argued that such criticism stemmed from superficial readings of the material and from Depression-era America's reaction to Fitzgerald's status as a symbol of Jazz Age excess.Template:Sfn The novel did not sell well upon publication, with approximately 12,000 sold in the first three months,Template:Sfnm but, like The Great Gatsby, the book's reputation has since grown significantly.Template:Sfn

Great Depression and decline

[Fitzgerald's] talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.

—Ernest Hemingway on Fitzgerald's loss of talent in A Moveable Feast (1964)Template:Sfn

Amid the Great Depression, Fitzgerald's works were deemed elitist and materialistic.Template:Sfnm In 1933, journalist Matthew Josephson criticized Fitzgerald's short stories saying that many Americans could no longer afford to drink champagne whenever they pleased or to go on vacation to Montparnasse in Paris.Template:Sfnm As writer Budd Schulberg recalled, "my generation thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald as an age rather than a writer, and when the economic stroke of 1929 began to change the sheiksTemplate:Efn and flappers into unemployed boys or underpaid girls, we consciously and a little belligerently turned our backs on Fitzgerald."Template:Sfnm

With his popularity decreased, Fitzgerald began to suffer financially and, by 1936, his book royalties amounted to $80.Template:Sfn The cost of his opulent lifestyle and Zelda's medical bills quickly caught up, placing him in constant debt. He relied on loans from his agent, Harold Ober, and publisher Perkins.Template:Sfnm When Ober ceased advancing money, an ashamed Fitzgerald severed ties with his agent believing Ober had lost faith in him due to his alcoholism.Template:Sfnm

As he had been an alcoholic for many years,Template:Efn Fitzgerald's heavy drinking undermined his health by the late 1930s.Template:Sfn His alcoholism resulted in cardiomyopathy, coronary artery disease, angina, dyspnea, and syncopal spells.Template:Sfn According to biographer Nancy Milford, Fitzgerald's claims of having tuberculosis (TB) served as a pretext to cover his drinking ailments.Template:Sfn Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli contends Fitzgerald did in fact have recurring TB.Template:Sfn Another biographer, Arthur Mizener, notes Fitzgerald had a mild attack of TB in 1919 and conclusively had a tubercular hemorrhage in 1929.Template:Sfn In the 1930s, as his health deteriorated, Fitzgerald had told Hemingway of his fear of dying from congested lungs.Template:Sfn

Fitzgerald's deteriorating health, chronic alcoholism, and financial woes made for difficult years in Baltimore. His friend H. L. Mencken wrote in a June 1934 diary entry that "the case of F. Scott Fitzgerald has become distressing. He is boozing in a wild manner and has become a nuisance. His wife, Zelda, who has been insane for years, is now confined at the Sheppard-Pratt Hospital, and he is living in Park Avenue with his little daughter, Scottie".Template:Sfn By 1935, alcoholism disrupted Fitzgerald's writing and limited his mental acuity.Template:Sfn From 1933 to 1937, he was hospitalized for alcoholism eight times.Template:Sfn In September 1936, journalist Michel Mok of the New York Post publicly reported Fitzgerald's alcoholism and career failure in a nationally syndicated article.Template:Sfnm The article damaged Fitzgerald's reputation and prompted him to attempt suicide after reading it.Template:Sfnm

By that same year, Zelda's intense suicidal mania necessitated her extended confinement at the Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina.Template:Sfnm Nearly bankrupt, Fitzgerald spent most of 1936 and 1937 living in cheap hotels near Asheville.Template:Sfnm His attempts to write and sell more short stories faltered.Template:Sfn He later referred to this period of decline in his life as "The Crack-Up" in a short story.Template:Sfnm The sudden death of Fitzgerald's mother and Zelda's mental deterioration led to his marriage further disintegrating.Template:Sfn He saw Zelda for the last time on a 1939 trip to Cuba.Template:Sfn During this trip, spectators at a cockfight beat Fitzgerald when he tried to intervene against animal cruelty.Template:Sfnm He returned to the United States and—his ill-health exacerbated by excessive drinking—underwent hospitalization at the Doctors Hospital in Manhattan.Template:Sfnm

Return to Hollywood

A photograph of Fitzgerald taken by Carl van Vechten three years prior to the author's death. Fitzgerald is facing three quarters to the left next to a small plant and adjacent to a wall. He is wearing a checkered coat and a short square tie with broad horizontal stripes. A burning cigarette is held in his right hand.

A middle-aged Fitzgerald in 1937, three years before his death

Fitzgerald's dire financial straits compelled him to accept a lucrative contract as a screenwriter with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) in 1937 that necessitated his relocation to Hollywood.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Despite earning his highest annual income up to that point ($29,757.87, ),Template:Sfn Fitzgerald spent the bulk of his income on Zelda's psychiatric treatment and his daughter Scottie's school expenses.Template:Sfnm During the next two years, Fitzgerald rented a cheap room at the Garden of Allah bungalow on Sunset Boulevard. In an effort to abstain from alcohol, Fitzgerald drank large amounts of Coca-Cola and ate many sweets.Template:Sfnm

Estranged from Zelda, Fitzgerald attempted to reunite with his first love Ginevra King when the wealthy Chicago heiress visited Hollywood in 1938.Template:Sfnm "She was the first girl I ever loved and I have faithfully avoided seeing her up to this moment to keep the illusion perfect," Fitzgerald informed his daughter Scottie, shortly before the planned meeting.Template:Sfn The reunion proved a disaster due to Fitzgerald's uncontrollable alcoholism, and a disappointed Ginevra returned east to Chicago.Template:Sfnm

Soon after, a lonely Fitzgerald began a relationship with nationally syndicated gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death.Template:Sfn After having a heart-attack at Schwab's Pharmacy, Fitzgerald was advised by his doctor to avoid strenuous exertion. Fitzgerald had to climb two flights of stairs to his apartment, while Graham lived on the ground floor.Template:Sfnm Consequently, he moved in with Graham, who lived in Hollywood on North Hayworth Avenue, one block east of Fitzgerald's apartment on North Laurel Avenue.Template:Sfnm

Throughout their relationship, Graham claimed Fitzgerald felt constant guilt over Zelda's mental illness and confinement. He repeatedly attempted sobriety, had depression, had violent outbursts, and attempted suicide.Template:Sfn On occasions that Fitzgerald failed his attempt at sobriety,Template:Efn he would ask strangers, "I'm F. Scott Fitzgerald. You've read my books. You've read The Great Gatsby, haven't you? Remember?"Template:Sfn As Graham had read none of his works, Fitzgerald attempted to buy her a set of his novels.Template:Sfn After visiting several bookstores, he realized they had stopped carrying his works.Template:Sfn The realization that he was largely forgotten as an author further depressed him.

During this last phase of his career, Fitzgerald's screenwriting tasks included revisions on Madame Curie (1943) and an unused dialogue polish for Gone with the Wind (1939)—a book which Fitzgerald disparaged as unoriginal and an "old wives' tale".Template:Sfnm Both assignments went uncredited.Template:Sfnm His work on Three Comrades (1938) became his sole screenplay credit.Template:Sfnm To the studio's annoyance, Fitzgerald ignored scriptwriting rules and included descriptions more fitting for a novel.Template:Sfn In his spare time, he worked on his fifth novel, The Last Tycoon,Template:Efn based on film executive Irving Thalberg.Template:Sfnm In 1939, MGM terminated his contract, and Fitzgerald became a freelance screenwriter.Template:Sfnm During his work on Winter Carnival (1939), Fitzgerald had an alcoholic relapse and sought treatment by New York psychiatrist Richard Hoffmann.Template:Sfn

Director Billy Wilder described Fitzgerald's foray into Hollywood as like that of "a great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job".Template:Sfnm Edmund Wilson and Aaron Latham suggested Hollywood sucked Fitzgerald's creativity like a vampire.Template:Sfn His failure in Hollywood pushed him to return to drinking, and he drank nearly 40 beers a day in 1939.Template:Sfn Beginning that year, Fitzgerald mocked himself as a Hollywood hack through the character of Pat Hobby in a sequence of 17 short stories. Esquire originally published The Pat Hobby Stories between January 1940 and July 1941.Template:Sfnm Approaching the final year of life, Fitzgerald wrote regretfully to his daughter: "I wish now I'd never relaxed or looked back—but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: I've found my line—from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty—without this I am nothing."Template:Sfnm

Final year and death

Photograph of the grave of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald in Rockville, Maryland, taken during a snowless winter. The headstone reads: "Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald. September 24, 1896 - December 21, 1940. His wife Zelda Sayre. July 24, 1900 - March 10, 1948." Beneath the headstone is a gray slab inscribed with the final line of The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

The Fitzgeralds' current grave at St. Mary's in Maryland, inscribed with the final sentence of The Great Gatsby

Fitzgerald achieved sobriety over a year before his death, and Graham described their last year together as one of the happiest times of their relationship.Template:Sfnm On the night of December 20, 1940, Fitzgerald and Graham attended the premiere of This Thing Called Love.Template:Sfn As the couple left the Pantages Theatre, a sober Fitzgerald experienced a dizzy spell and had difficulty walking to his vehicle.Template:Sfn Watched by onlookers, he remarked in a strained voice to Graham, "I suppose people will think I'm drunk."Template:Sfn

The following day, as Fitzgerald annotated his newly arrived Princeton Alumni Weekly,Template:Sfnm Graham saw him jump from his armchair, grab the mantelpiece, and collapse on the floor without uttering a sound.Template:Sfnm Lying flat on his back, he gasped and lapsed into unconsciousness.Template:Sfnm After failed efforts to revive him, Graham ran to fetch Harry Culver, the building's manager.Template:Sfnm Upon entering the apartment, Culver stated, "I'm afraid he's dead."Template:Sfnm Fitzgerald died of a heart attack due to occlusive coronary arteriosclerosis at 44 years old.Template:Sfn

On learning of her father's death, Scottie telephoned Graham from Vassar and asked she not attend the funeral for social propriety. In Graham's place, her friend Dorothy Parker attended the visitation held in the back room of an undertaker's parlor.Template:Sfnm Observing few other people at the visitation, Parker murmured "the poor son of a bitch"—a line from Jay Gatsby's funeral in The Great Gatsby.Template:Sfnm When Fitzgerald's poorly embalmed corpse arrived in Bethesda, Maryland, only thirty people attended his funeral.Template:EfnTemplate:Sfnm Among the attendees were his only child, Scottie, his agent Harold Ober, and his lifelong editor Maxwell Perkins.Template:Sfn

Zelda eulogized Fitzgerald in a letter to a friend: "He was as spiritually generous a soul as ever was... It seems as if he was always planning happiness for Scottie and for me. Books to read—places to go. Life seemed so promising always when he was around. ... Scott was the best friend a person could have to me".Template:Sfn At the time of his death, the Roman Catholic Church denied the family's request that Fitzgerald, a non-practicing Catholic, be buried in the family plot in the Catholic Saint Mary's Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland. Fitzgerald was buried instead with a simple Protestant service at Rockville Cemetery.Template:Sfnm When Zelda died in a fire at the Highland Hospital in 1948, she was buried next to him in Rockville Cemetery.Template:Sfnm In 1975, Scottie successfully petitioned to have the earlier decision revisited, and her parents' remains were moved to the family plot in Saint Mary's.Template:Sfnm

Critical reevaluation

It has been the greatest credo in my life that I would rather be an artist than a careerist. I would rather impress my image upon the soul of a people.... I would as soon be as anonymous as Rimbaud if I could feel that I had accomplished that purpose.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald in a letter to H. L. Mencken, 1934Template:Sfn

At the time of his death, Fitzgerald believed that his life was a failure and his work was forgotten.Template:Sfnm The few critics who were familiar with his work regarded him as a failed alcoholic—the embodiment of Jazz Age decadence.Template:Sfn In an obituary in The Nation magazine, Margaret Marshall dismissed Fitzgerald as a Jazz Age scribe "who did not fulfill his early promise—his was a fair-weather talent which was not adequate to the stormy age into which it happened, ironically, to emerge."Template:Sfn His New York Times obituary deemed his work forever tied to an era "when gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession".Template:Sfn In retrospective reviews that followed after his death, literary critics such as Peter Quennell dismissed his magnum opus The Great Gatsby as merely a nostalgic period piece with "the sadness and the remote jauntiness of a Gershwin tune".Template:Sfn

Surveying these posthumous attacks, John Dos Passos opined that many literary critics in popular newspapers lacked the basic discernment about the art of writing.Template:Sfn "The strange thing about the articles that came out about Fitzgerald's death," Dos Passos later recalled, "was that the writers seemed to feel that they didn't need to read his books; all they needed for a license to shovel them into the ashcan was to label them as having been written in such and such a period now past."Template:Sfn

Within one year after his death, Edmund Wilson completed Fitzgerald's unfinished fifth novel The Last Tycoon using the author's extensive notes,Template:EfnTemplate:Sfnm and he included The Great Gatsby within the edition, sparking new interest and discussion among critics.Template:Sfn Amid World War II, The Great Gatsby gained further popularity when the Council on Books in Wartime distributed free Armed Services Edition copies to American soldiers serving overseas. The Red Cross distributed the novel to prisoners in Japanese and German POW camps.Template:Sfn By 1945, over 123,000 copies of The Great Gatsby had been distributed among U.S. troops.Template:Sfn By 1960—thirty-five years after the novel's original publication—the book was selling 100,000 copies per year.Template:Sfn This renewed interest led The New York Times editorialist Arthur Mizener to proclaim the novel a masterwork of American literature.Template:Sfn In 1993, a new edition was published as The Love of the Last Tycoon, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli.

By the 21st century, The Great Gatsby had sold millions of copies, and the novel is required reading in many high school and college classes.Template:Sfn Despite its publication nearly a century ago, the work continues to be cited by scholars as relevant to understanding contemporary America.Template:Sfn According to Professor John Kuehl of New York University: "If you want to know about Spain, you read Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. If you want to know about the South, you read Faulkner. If you want to know what America's like, you read The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald is the quintessential American writer."Template:Sfn

Posthumous renown

Template:CSS image crop The Great GatsbyTemplate:'s popularity led to widespread interest in Fitzgerald himself.Template:Sfnm By the 1950s, he had become a cult figure in American culture and was more widely known than at any period during his lifetime.Template:Sfnm In 1952, critic Cyril Connolly observed that "apart from his increasing stature as writer, Fitzgerald is now firmly established as a myth, an American version of the Dying God, an Adonis of letters" whose rise and fall inevitably prompts comparisons to the Jazz Age itself.Template:Sfn

Seven years later, Fitzgerald's friend Edmund Wilson remarked that he now received copious letters from female admirers of Fitzgerald's works and that his flawed alcoholic friend had posthumously become "a semi-divine personage" in the popular imagination.Template:Sfn Echoing these opinions, writer Adam Gopnik asserted that—contrary to Fitzgerald's claim that "there are no second acts in American lives"—Fitzgerald became "not a poignant footnote to an ill-named time but an enduring legend of the West".Template:Sfn

Decades after his death, Fitzgerald's childhood Summit Terrace home in St. Paul became a National Historic Landmark in 1971.Template:Sfn Fitzgerald detested the house and deemed it an architectural monstrosity.Template:Sfn In 1990, Hofstra University established the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, which later became an affiliate of the American Literature Association.Template:Sfn During the COVID-19 pandemic, the society organized an online reading of This Side of Paradise to mark its centenary.Template:Sfn In 1994, the World Theater in St. Paul—home of the radio broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion—was renamed the Fitzgerald Theater.Template:Sfnm

Artistry

Literary evolution

Novels

Cover of Fitzgerald's 1920 novel, This Side of Paradise, by illustrator W. E. Hill. The cover's title text is in white font, and the background is dark yellow. The cover depicts a haughty young woman wearing a white dress and holding a hand fan with large white feathers. Behind her, a dashing young man in a dark suit, white shirt, and black bowtie is leaning forward as if to whisper in her ear.

Critics praised This Side of Paradise (1920) for its experimental style but derided its form and construction.

More so than most contemporary writers of his era, F. Scott Fitzgerald's authorial voice evolved and matured over time,Template:Sfnm and his each successive novel represented a discernible progression in literary quality.Template:Sfn Although his peers eventually hailed him as possessing "the best narrative gift of the century," this narrative gift was not perceived as immediately evident in his earliest writings.Template:Sfn Believing that prose has a basis in lyric verse,Template:Sfn Fitzgerald initially crafted his sentences entirely by ear and, consequently, his earliest efforts contained numerous malapropisms and descriptive non sequiturs which irritated both editors and readers.Template:Sfnm During these early attempts at writing fiction, he received over 122 rejection letters,Template:Sfn and the publishing house Scribner's rejected his first novel three times despite extensive rewrites.Template:Sfn

For his first novel, Fitzgerald used as his literary templates H. G. Wells' 1909 work Tono-Bungay and Sir Compton Mackenzie's 1913 novel Sinister Street,Template:Sfnm which chronicled a young college student's coming-of-age at Oxford University.Template:Sfn Although Fitzgerald imitated the plot of Mackenzie's novel, his debut work differed remarkably due to its experimental style.Template:Sfnm He discarded the stodgy narrative technique of most novels and instead unspooled the plot in the form of textual fragments, letters, and poetry intermingled together.Template:Sfn This atonal blend of different fictive elements prompted cultural elites to fête the young Fitzgerald as a literary trailblazer whose work modernized a staid literature that had lagged "as far behind modern habits as behind modern history."Template:Sfn His work, they declared, pulsed with originality.Template:Sfn

Although critics praised This Side of Paradise as highly original, they criticised its form and construction.Template:Sfnm They highlighted the fact that the work had "almost every fault and deficiency that a novel can possibly have,"Template:Sfn and a consensus soon emerged that Fitzgerald's prosemanship left much to be desired.Template:Sfnm He could write entertainingly, his detractors conceded, but he gave scant attention to form and construction.Template:Sfn Having read and digested these criticisms of his debut novel, Fitzgerald sought to improve upon the form and construction of his prose in his next work and to venture into a new genre of fiction altogether.Template:Sfn

Cover of Fitzgerald's 1922 novel, The Beautiful and Damned, by illustrator W. E. Hill. The cover appears to be a pencil sketch and depicts a young couple who resemble F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. The couple is reclining on a divan in the foreground with a large golden circle in the background. The young man is in a dark suit with a bowtie and white shirt. His arms are folded as if unhappy. The young woman is braless and has her legs crossed. Her hair is bobbed and she is wearing high heels.

Fitzgerald improved upon his form and construction in The Beautiful and Damned (1922).

For his sophomore effort, Fitzgerald discarded the trappings of collegiate bildungsromans and crafted an "ironical-pessimistic" [sic] novel in the style of Thomas Hardy's oeuvre.Template:Sfn With the publication of The Beautiful and Damned, editor Max Perkins and others commended the conspicuous evolution in the quality of his prose.Template:Sfnm Whereas This Side of Paradise had featured workmanlike prose and chaotic organization, The Beautiful and Damned displayed the superior form and construction of an awakened literary consciousness.Template:Sfnm

Although critics deemed The Beautiful and Damned to be less ground-breaking than its predecessor,Template:Sfnm many recognized that the vast improvement in literary form and construction between his first and second novels augured great prospects for Fitzgerald's future.Template:Sfn John V. A. Weaver predicted in 1922 that, as Fitzgerald matured as a writer, he would become regarded as one of the greatest authors of American literature.Template:Sfn Consequently, expectations arose that Fitzgerald would significantly improve with his third work.Template:Sfn

When composing The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald chose to depart from the writing process of his previous novels and to fashion a conscious artistic achievement.Template:Sfn He eschewed the realism of his previous two novels and composed a creative work of sustained imagination.Template:Sfnm To this end, he consciously emulated the literary styles of Joseph Conrad and Willa Cather.Template:Sfnm He was particularly influenced by Cather's 1923 work, A Lost Lady,Template:Sfnm which features a wealthy married socialite pursued by a number of romantic suitors and who symbolically embodies the American dream.Template:Sfnm

With the publication of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald had refined his prose style and plot construction, and the literati now hailed him as a master of his craft.Template:SfnmTemplate:Sfn Readers complimented him that Gatsby "is compact, economical, polished in the technique of the novel,"Template:Sfn and his writing now contained "some of the nicest little touches of contemporary observation you could imagine—so light, so delicate, so sharp".Template:Sfn By eliminating the earlier defects in his writing, he had upgraded from "a brilliant improvisateur" to "a conscientious and painstaking artist."Template:Sfn Gertrude Stein posited that Fitzgerald had surpassed contemporary writers such as Hemingway due to his masterful ability to write in natural sentences.Template:Sfn

Dust jacket of The Great Gatsby by illustrator Francis Cugat. The book cover has a white-lettered title against a dark blue sky. Beneath the title are lips and two eyes, looming over a carnival-like metropolis.

With the publication of The Great Gatsby (1925), critics deemed Fitzgerald to have mastered the craft of a novelist.

The realization that Fitzgerald had improved as a novelist to point that Gatsby was a masterwork was immediately evident to certain members of the literary world.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Edith Wharton lauded Gatsby as such an improvement upon Fitzgerald's previous work that it represented a "leap into the future" for American novels,Template:Sfn and T. S. Eliot believed it represented a turning point in American literature.Template:Sfn After reading Gatsby, Gertrude Stein declared that Fitzgerald would "be read when many of his well-known contemporaries are forgotten."Template:Sfn Today, The Great Gatsby is often cited as a literary masterwork and a contender for the title of the "Great American Novel".Template:SfnTemplate:Sfnm

Nine years after the publication of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald completed his fourth novel Tender Is the Night in 1934. By this time, the field of literature had greatly changed due to the onset of the Great Depression, and once popular writers such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway who wrote about upper-middle-class lifestyles were now disparaged in literary periodicals whereas so-called "proletarian novelists" enjoyed general applause.Template:Sfnm

Due to this change, although Fitzgerald showed a mastery of "verbal nuance, flexible rhythm, dramatic construction and essential tragi-comedy" in Tender Is the Night,Template:Sfn many reviewers dismissed the work for its disengagement with the political issues of the era.Template:Sfn Nevertheless, a minority opinion praised the work as the best American novel since The Great Gatsby.Template:Sfn Summarizing Fitzgerald's artistic journey from apprentice novelist to magisterial author, Burke Van Allen observed that no other American novelist had shown such "a constantly growing mastery of his equipment, and a regularly increasing sensitivity to the esthetic values in life."Template:Sfn

After Fitzgerald's death, writers such as John Dos Passos assayed Fitzgerald's gradual progression in literary quality and posited that his uncompleted fifth novel The Last Tycoon could have been Fitzgerald's greatest achievement.Template:Sfn Dos Passos argued in 1945 that Fitzgerald had finally attained a grand and distinctive style as a novelist; consequently, even as an unfinished fragment, the dimensions of his work raised "the level of American fiction" in the same way that "Marlowe's blank verse line raised the whole of Elizabeth verse."Template:Sfn

Short stories

A cover of The Saturday Evening Post with a young flapper sipping a drink on the beach. A man's straw hat is next to her.

Critics regard Fitzgerald's stories for slick magazines as inferior to his novels.

In contrast to the discernible progression in literary quality and artistic maturity represented by his novels,Template:Sfn Fitzgerald's 164 short stories displayed the opposite tendency and attracted significant criticism.Template:Sfnm Whereas he composed his novels with a conscious artistic mindset, money became his primary impetus for writing short stories.Template:Sfn During the lengthy interludes between novels, his stories sustained him financially,Template:Sfn but he lamented that he had "to write a lot of rotten stuff that bores me and makes me depressed."Template:Sfn

Realizing that slick magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post and Esquire were more likely to publish stories that pandered to young love and featured saccharine dénouements, Fitzgerald became adept at tailoring his short fiction to the vicissitudes of commercial tastes.Template:SfnmTemplate:Sfn In this fashion, he quickly became one of the highest-paid magazine writers of his era and he earned $4,000 per story from the Saturday Evening Post at the apex of his fame.Template:Sfn

From 1920 until his death, Fitzgerald published nearly four pieces per year in the magazine and, in 1931 alone, he earned nearly $40,000 () by churning out seventeen short stories in quick succession.Template:Sfn

Although a dazzling extemporizer, Fitzgerald's short stories were criticized for lacking both thematic coherence and quality.Template:Sfn Critic Paul Rosenfeld wrote that many of Fitzgerald's short stories "lie on a plane inferior to the one upon which his best material extends."Template:Sfn Echoing Hemingway's critique that Fitzgerald ruined his short stories by rewriting them to appease magazine readers,Template:Sfn Rosenfeld noted that Fitzgerald debased his gift as a storyteller by transforming his tales into social romances with inevitably happy endings.Template:Sfn

Commenting upon this tendency in Fitzgerald's short stories, Dos Passos remarked that "everybody who has put pen to paper during the last twenty years has been daily plagued by the difficulty of deciding whether he's to do 'good' writing that will satisfy his conscience or 'cheap' writing that will satisfy his pocketbook.... A great deal of Fitzgerald's own life was made a hell by this sort of schizophrenia."Template:Sfn

Fictive themes

Generational zeitgeist

Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (1920)Template:Sfn

For much of his literary career, cultural commentators hailed Fitzgerald as the foremost chronicler of the Jazz Age generation whose lives were defined by the societal transition towards modernity.Template:Sfnm In contrast to the older Lost Generation to which Fitzgerald and Hemingway belonged, the Jazz Age generation were younger Americans who had been adolescents during World War I and were largely untouched by the devastating conflict's psychological and material horrors.Template:EfnTemplate:Sfnm

With his debut novel, Fitzgerald became the first writer to turn the national spotlight upon this generation.Template:Sfnm He riveted the nation's attention upon the activities of their sons and daughters cavorting in the rumble seat of Bearcat roadster on a lonely road and sparked a societal debate over their perceived immorality.Template:Sfnm Due to this thematic focus, his works became a sensation among college students, and the press depicted him as the standard-bearer for "youth in revolt".Template:Sfn "No generation of Americans has had a chronicler so persuasive and unmaudlin" as Fitzgerald, Van Allen wrote in 1934, and no author was so identified with the generation recorded.Template:Sfn

Remarking upon the cultural association between Fitzgerald and the flaming youth of the Jazz Age, Gertrude Stein wrote in her memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that the author's fiction essentially created this new generation in the public's mind.Template:Sfn Echoing this assertion, critics John V. A. Weaver and Edmund Wilson insisted that Fitzgerald imbued the Jazz Age generation with the gift of self-consciousness while simultaneously making the public aware of them as a distinct cohort.Template:Sfn

The perception of Fitzgerald as the chronicler of the Jazz Age and its insouciant youth led various societal figures to denounce his writings.Template:Sfnm They decried his use of modern "alien slang" and claimed his depiction of young people engaged in drunken sprees and premarital sex to be wholly fabricated.Template:Sfn Fitzgerald ridiculed such criticisms,Template:Sfnm and he opined that blinkered pundits wished to dismiss his works in order to retain their outdated conceptions of American society.Template:Sfn

As Fitzgerald's writings made him "the outstanding aggressor in the little warfare" between "the flaming youth against the old guard,"Template:Sfn a number of social conservatives later rejoiced when he died.Template:Sfn Mere weeks after Fitzgerald's death in 1940, Westbrook Pegler wrote in a column for The New York World-Telegram that the author's passing recalled "memories of a queer bunch of undisciplined and self-indulgent brats who were determined not to pull their weight in the boat and wanted the world to drop everything and sit down and bawl with them. A kick in the pants and a clout over the scalp were more like their needing."Template:Sfn

Wealth inequality

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are....

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Rich Boy" (1926)Template:Sfn

A recurrent theme in F. Scott Fitzgerald's fiction is the psychic and moral gulf between the average American and wealthy elites.Template:Sfn This recurrent theme is ascribable to Fitzgerald's life experiences in which he was "a poor boy in a rich town; a poor boy in a rich boy's school; a poor boy in a rich man's club at Princeton."Template:Sfn He "sensed a corruption in the rich and mistrusted their might."Template:Sfn Consequently, he became a vocal critic of America's leisure class and his works satirized their lives.Template:Sfn

This preoccupation with the idle lives of America's leisure class in Fitzgerald's fiction attracted criticism.Template:Sfnm H. L. Mencken believed Fitzgerald's myopic focus upon the rich detracted from the broader relevance of his societal observations.Template:Sfn He argued that "the thing that chiefly interests the basic Fitzgerald is still the florid show of modern American life—and especially the devil's dance and that goes on at the top. He is unconcerned about the sweating and suffering of the nether herd".Template:Sfn

Nevertheless, Mencken conceded that Fitzgerald came the closest to capturing the wealthy's "idiotic pursuit of sensation, their almost incredible stupidity and triviality, their glittering swinishness".Template:Sfn His works skewered those "who take all of the privileges of the European ruling class and assume none of its responsibilities".Template:Sfn For this reason, critics predicted that much of Fitzgerald's fiction would become timeless social documents that captured the naked venality of the hedonistic Jazz Age.Template:Sfnm

Following Fitzgerald's death, scholars focused on how Fitzgerald's fiction dissects the entrenched class disparities in American society.Template:Sfnm His novel, The Great Gatsby, underscores the limits of the American lower class to transcend their station of birth.Template:Sfn Although scholars posit different explanations for the continuation of class differences in the United States, there is a consensus regarding Fitzgerald's belief in its underlying permanence.Template:Sfnm Although fundamental conflict occurs between entrenched sources of socio-economic power and upstarts who threaten their interests,Template:Sfn Fitzgerald's fiction shows that a class permanence persists despite the country's capitalist economy that prizes innovation and adaptability.Template:Sfn Even if the poorer Americans become rich, they remain inferior to those Americans with "old money".Template:Sfn Consequently, Fitzgerald's characters are trapped in a rigid American class system.Template:Sfn

Otherness

Much of Fitzgerald's fiction is informed by his life experiences as a societal outsider.Template:Sfnm As a young boy growing up in the Midwest, he perpetually strained "to meet the standard of the rich people of St. Paul and Chicago among whom he had to grow up without ever having the money to compete with them".Template:Sfn His wealthier neighbors viewed the young author and his family to be lower-class, and his classmates at affluent institutions such as Newman and Princeton regarded him as a parvenu.Template:Sfnm His later life as an expatriate in Europe and as a writer in Hollywood reinforced this lifelong sense of being an outsider.Template:Sfn

Consequently, many of Fitzgerald's characters are defined by their sense of "otherness".Template:Sfnm In particular, Jay Gatsby, whom other characters belittle as "Mr. Nobody from Nowhere",Template:Sfnm functions as a cipher because of his obscure origins, his unclear ethno-religious identity and his indeterminate class status.Template:Sfn Much like Fitzgerald, Gatsby's ancestry precludes him from the coveted status of Old Stock Americans.Template:Sfn Consequently, Gatsby's ascent is deemed a threat not only due to his status as nouveau riche, but because he is perceived as an outsider.Template:Sfn

Because of such themes, scholars assert that Fitzgerald's fiction captures the perennial American experience, since it is a story about outsiders and those who resent them—whether such outsiders are newly-arrived immigrants, the nouveau riche, or successful minorities.Template:Sfn Since Americans living in the 1920s to the present must navigate a society with entrenched prejudices, Fitzgerald's depiction of resultant status anxieties and social conflict in his fiction has been highlighted by scholars as still enduringly relevant nearly a hundred years later.Template:Sfn

Criticism

Alleged vacuity

Although many contemporary critics and literary peers regarded Fitzgerald as possessing "the best narrative gift of the century",Template:Sfn they nonetheless contended that his fiction lacked engagement with the salient socio-political issues of his time,Template:Sfnm and he lacked a conscious awareness of how to use his considerable talent as an author.Template:Sfnm

Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, who met Fitzgerald during his years abroad in Paris, likened him to "a stupid old woman with whom someone has left a diamond; she is extremely proud of the diamond and shows it to everyone who comes by, and everyone is surprised that such an ignorant old woman should possess so valuable a jewel".Template:Sfn His friend Edmund Wilson concurred with Millay's assessment and averred that Fitzgerald was a gifted writer with a vivid imagination who did not have any intellectual ideas to express.Template:Sfn Wilson argued that Fitzgerald's early works such as This Side of Paradise suffer from the defects of being meaningless and lacking intellectual substance.Template:Sfnm

Wilson attempted to convince Fitzgerald to write about America's social problems, but Fitzgerald did not believe that fiction should be used as a political instrument.Template:Sfn Wilson also pressed Fitzgerald to support causes like the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, but Fitzgerald had no interest in activism,Template:Sfn and he became annoyed to even read articles about the politically-fraught Sacco and Vanzetti case, which became a cause célèbre among American literati during the 1920s.Template:Sfn Largely indifferent to politics, Fitzgerald himself ascribed the lack of ideational substance in his fiction to his upbringing, as his parents were likewise uninterested in such matters.

Fitzgerald partly justified the perceived lack of political and intellectual substance in his fiction by arguing that he was writing for a new, largely apolitical, generation "dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken."Template:Sfnm "Nobody was interested in politics," Fitzgerald declared of this particular generation,Template:Sfn and, as "it was characteristic of the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics at all", Fitzgerald's fiction reflected the contemporary zeitgeist's perfunctory cynicism and aversion to political crusades in the wake of Prohibition.Template:Sfn

Appropriative tendency

Throughout his literary career, Fitzgerald often drew upon the private correspondence, diary entries, and life experiences of other persons to use in his fiction.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn While writing This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald quoted verbatim entire letters sent to him by his Catholic mentor, Father Sigourney Fay. In addition to using Fay's correspondence, Fitzgerald drew upon anecdotes that Fay had told him about his private life.Template:Sfn When reading This Side of Paradise, Fay wrote to Fitzgerald that the use of his own biographical experiences told in confidence to the young author "gave him a queer feeling."Template:Sfn

Fitzgerald continued this practice throughout his life. While writing The Beautiful and Damned, Fitzgerald inserted sentences from his wife's diary.Template:Sfnm When his friend Burton Rascoe asked Zelda to review the book for the New-York Tribune as a publicity stunt,Template:Sfn she wrote—partly in jest—that it "seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and also scraps of letters, which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar."Template:EfnTemplate:Sfn Similarly, Fitzgerald borrowed biographical incidents from his friend, Ludlow Fowler, for his short story "The Rich Boy".Template:Sfn Fowler asked that certain passages be excised prior to publication.Template:Sfn Fitzgerald acquiesced to this request, but the passages were restored in later reprints after Fitzgerald's death.Template:Sfn

Perhaps the most striking example of this tendency lies at the core of The Great Gatsby.Template:Sfn As a parting gift before their relationship ended, Ginevra King—the inspiration for Daisy Buchanan—wrote a story that she sent to Fitzgerald.Template:Sfn In her story, she is trapped in a loveless marriage with a wealthy man, yet still pines for Fitzgerald, a former lover from her past.Template:Sfn The lovers are reunited only after Fitzgerald has attained enough money to take her away from her adulterous husband.Template:Sfn Fitzgerald frequently re-read Ginevra's story, and scholars have noted the plot similarities between Ginevra's story and Fitzgerald's novel.Template:Sfn

Influence and legacy

Literary influence

As one of the leading authorial voices of the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald's literary style influenced a number of contemporary and future writers.Template:Sfn As early as 1922, critic John V. A. Weaver noted that Fitzgerald's literary influence was already "so great that it cannot be estimated."Template:Sfn

Similar to Edith Wharton and Henry James, Fitzgerald's style often used a series of disconnected scenes to convey plot developments.Template:Sfn His lifelong editor Max Perkins described this particular technique as creating the impression for the reader of a railroad journey in which the vividness of passing scenes blaze with life.Template:Sfn In the style of Joseph Conrad, Fitzgerald often employed a narrator's device to unify these passing scenes and imbue them with deeper meaning.Template:Sfn

Gatsby remains Fitzgerald's most influential literary work as an author. The publication of The Great Gatsby prompted poet T. S. Eliot to opine that the novel was the most significant evolution in American fiction since the works of Henry James.Template:Sfn Charles Jackson, author of The Lost Weekend, wrote that Gatsby was the only flawless novel in the history of American literature.Template:Sfn Later authors Budd Schulberg and Edward Newhouse were deeply affected by it, and John O'Hara acknowledged its influence on his work. Richard Yates, a writer often compared to Fitzgerald, hailed The Great Gatsby as showcasing Fitzgerald's miraculous talent and triumphal literary technique.Template:Sfn An editorial in The New York Times summarized the considerable influence of Fitzgerald upon contemporary writers and Americans in general during the Jazz Age: "In the literary sense he invented a 'generation' ... He might have interpreted them, and even guided them, as in their middle years they saw a different and nobler freedom threatened with destruction."Template:Sfn

Adaptations and portrayals

Fitzgerald's stories and novels have been adapted into a variety of media formats. His earliest short stories were cinematically adapted as flapper comedies such as The Husband Hunter (1920), The Chorus Girl's Romance (1920), and The Off-Shore Pirate (1921).Template:Sfnm Other Fitzgerald short stories have been adapted into episodes of anthology television series,Template:Sfn as well as the 2008 film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.Template:Sfn Nearly every novel by Fitzgerald has been adapted for the screen. His second novel The Beautiful and Damned was filmed in 1922 and 2010.Template:Sfn His third novel The Great Gatsby has been adapted numerous times for both film and television, most notably in 1926, 1949, 1958, 1974, 2000, and 2013.Template:Sfnm His fourth novel Tender Is the Night was made into a 1955 CBS television episode, an eponymous 1962 film, and a BBC television miniseries in 1985.Template:Sfn The Last Tycoon has been adapted into a 1976 film,Template:Sfn and a 2016 Amazon Prime TV miniseries.Template:Sfn

Beyond adaptations of his works, Fitzgerald himself has been portrayed in dozens of books, plays, and films. He inspired Budd Schulberg's novel The Disenchanted (1950),Template:Sfn later adapted into a Broadway play starring Jason Robards.Template:Sfn Other theatrical productions of Fitzgerald's life include Frank Wildhorn's 2005 musical Waiting for the Moon,Template:Sfn and a musical produced by the Japanese Takarazuka Revue.Template:Sfn Fitzgerald's relationships with Sheilah Graham and Frances Kroll Ring respectively served as the basis for the films Beloved Infidel (1959) and Last Call (2002).Template:SfnTemplate:Sfnm Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda have appeared as characters in the films Midnight in Paris (2011) and Genius (2016).Template:Sfnm Other depictions of Fitzgerald include the TV movies Zelda (1993), F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood (1976), The Last of the Belles (1974), and the TV series Z: The Beginning of Everything (2015).Template:Sfn

Selected works

Cover of Fitzgerald's 1923 play, The Vegetable, by illustrator Ralph Barton. The cover features a bright red background with cartoon characters in the foreground. The cartoon characters include a mayor, a military general, a housewife, a stooped old man, a dude in a bowler hat, a music conductor, and a young couple.

Cover of Fitzgerald's 1923 play, The Vegetable

Novels

• 1920 – This Side of Paradise
• 1922 – The Beautiful and Damned
• 1922 – The Diamond as Big as the Ritz (Novella)
• 1925 – The Great Gatsby
• 1934 – Tender Is the Night
• 1941 – The Last Tycoon (unfinished)

Short stories

• 1920 – "The Ice Palace"
• 1920 – "Bernice Bobs Her Hair"
• 1920 – "May Day"
• 1922 – "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
• 1922 – "Winter Dreams"
• 1924 – "Absolution"
• 1926 – "The Rich Boy"
• 1931 – "Babylon Revisited"

Essays

• 1931 – "Echoes of the Jazz Age"

External links

• Template:StandardEbooks
• Template:FadedPage
• Template:Internet Archive author
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• F. Scott Fitzgerald Papers at Princeton University
• Catalog of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Personal Library at LibraryThing
• "Writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald" from C-SPAN's American Writers: A Journey Through History
• F. Scott Fitzgerald in MNopedia, the Minnesota Encyclopedia
• Interview with John Koblas and Dave Hage, author of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Toward the Summit, plus coverage of a Fitzgerald literary celebration, NORTHERN LIGHTS Minnesota Author Interview TV Series #361 (1996)